


Photographs and Memories

by Raptor



Category: Alias
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-09
Updated: 2007-07-09
Packaged: 2017-10-08 14:34:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/76641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raptor/pseuds/Raptor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sydney reflects on her childhood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Photographs and Memories

Sydney massages her forehead and lets out a small sigh, glancing at the stacks of books piled high on the table in front of her. She's been writing feverously for several hours, attempting to finish a literary critique long past due and hoping her inspired words will placate her skeptical advisor, convincing him a graduate education is of the highest priority to her. She closes the laptop with a click and begins to re-shelve the leather bound volumes.

Handling these books has always brought to mind their former owner; she wonders how much her mother's vocation has affected her own educational choices. Would she be studying literature herself if not for spending her first impressionable years in the home of a literary professor? It's ironic, she thinks, as she now realizes she has been unknowingly following in her father's footsteps as well.

Books safely returned to their resting places, she grasps the cardboard box still housing her most treasured mementos from childhood. Removing a handful of photos, she studies the topmost image, her mother's likeness yellowed and worn with time. Her recollection has also faded with time and she wonders if she would still be able to recall her face at all if not for the aid of photographs. She thinks their ages are not all that dissimilar, she and the woman gazing back at her.

From what she can remember, those early years had been happy ones, she thinks. Vague recollections of a contented childhood hover on the fringes of her thoughts: a warm, welcoming home filled with genuine affection, spontaneous laughter and unquestioning love. She distinctly recalls her mother's kind, inviting smile, a tender embrace to appease hurt feelings, a soothing kiss for a skinned knee. She wonders briefly if her remembrances have been romanticized by the passage of time and decides that they have not.

Her early memories of her father are surprisingly difficult to conjure up, obscured by more recent recollections of a sterile, empty household filled by his absence, distance and indifference. What a strange pair the two of them made, she thinks: her mother open and warm, her father cold and unreachable.

Replacing the photographs she makes her way to the couch with the lone book remaining within reach. Upon opening, the inscription on the inside cover catches her eye; written in another time to a woman long gone, by a man she can't quite make herself believe, ever existed. Had her death changed him so fundamentally? Still, whatever he had become, he was and always would be her father.

If Danny's death had reminded her of anything, it was of the uncertainty of life, a lesson first taught indelibly to her 20 years prior on a cold, dark night. Eight years, she thinks, it had been eight years. As she flips through the worn pages to the passage where she last left off, she decides, tomorrow she will ask him. It's long past due that they should share a meal together.

She will do it for her mother. Her mother, she knows, would want her to. She thinks, if only she had lived, how different their lives might be.


End file.
